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Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the journal iScience published a study by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London which analyzed how people across the United States—cumulatively nearly a quarter of a million, across twenty years—spent their time during a twenty-four-hour window. The data for 2023, the most recent year covered, showed that participants spent an average of sixteen minutes “reading for pleasure,” which included reading a magazine, book, or newspaper; listening to audiobooks; or reading on an electronic device. That figure, however, partially obscured a more striking finding: only sixteen per cent of the respondents read for pleasure at all during the day that was surveyed. In 2004, that figure was twenty-eight per cent. It is the trend line that is most alarming: in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

Our information ecosystem is in the process of a similarly profound transformation. In 2025, The New Yorker celebrated its centenary. The question that has inevitably come up is whether the magazine can survive another hundred years. We’re now much more than a weekly print magazine, of course. We’re also a daily digital enterprise, active on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. This year brought a first: The New Yorker won a Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting. And a short film that we released won an Oscar—our second.

But I believe that The New Yorker will always be a word-driven enterprise, even decades from now, when the world might appear unrecognizable to a denizen of the year 2025. Here we celebrate words, and the way they can be arranged on the page—or screen—to surprise, delight, and inform; the way they can transport you; the way they can hold the powerful to account. Millions of people continue to read them. And we believe that this will be the case for many years to come.

It is in this spirit that we bring to you the most popular New Yorker stories of 2025, measured in the total time that people spent reading them. Consider this your personal year-end reading list, one that we hope provides hours of pleasure.

A Battle with My Blood

“When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.”

Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker

How Police Let One of America’s Most Prolific Predators Get Away

When a prosecutor began chasing an accused serial rapist, she lost her job but unravelled a scandal. Why were the police refusing to investigate Sean Williams?

The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen

As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.

How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump

At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?

Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity.

Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t

Some psychiatric patients may actually have treatable autoimmune conditions. But what happens to the newly sane?

Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.

The Best Books of 2025

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2025 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry.

Patti LuPone Is Done with Broadway—and Almost Everything Else

The theatre diva, famed and feared for her salty bravado, dishes on Hal Prince, her non-friendship with Audra McDonald, and sexy but dumb New York Rangers.

We Might Have to “Shut Down the Country”

In an interview, Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, talks about what he thinks could happen if the Trump Administration defies the authority of the courts.

The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons

“The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died.”

What Did Men Do to Deserve This?

Changes in the economy and in the culture seem to have hit them hard. Scott Galloway believes they need an “aspirational vision of masculinity.”

Illustration by Max Guther

Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?

With its standout deals and generous employment practices, the warehouse chain became a feel-good American institution. In a fraught time, it can be hard to remain beloved.

Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits—how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives.

After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution

People who love Phish do so with a quasi-religious devotion. People who dislike Phish do so with an equal fervor.

Photographs by Peter Fisher for The New Yorker

The End of Children

Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

Why Biden’s White House Press Secretary Is Leaving the Democratic Party

Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.

The Leaning Tower of New York

How a luxury condo building in Manhattan went sideways.

“Wicked: For Good” Is Very, Very Bad

In the second of two movies adapted from the Broadway musical, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo battle fascism, bigotry, and some fairly dreadful filmmaking.

The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai

Daniel Kinahan, an Irish drug dealer, commands a billion-dollar empire from the U.A.E. Why isn’t he in prison?

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

Photograph by Balarama Heller

Why I Broke Up with New York

“Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way.”

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

Power Houses: A Photo Portfolio

Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers.

Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”

He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life.

In the early nineteen-thirties, three young gay men made the scene in bohemian Los Angeles, absorbing influences and shaping one another’s tastes. They staged art shows and concerts; they lectured confidently on aesthetics; they gawked at modernist architecture; they read Proust aloud. The leader of the trio was a thirty-year-old poet and artist named Donald Sample, who’d gone to Harvard and then wandered around Europe. In 1930, on the island of Capri, Sample had met an eighteen-year-old college dropout named John Cage, who had dabbled in literature, art, architecture, and music but had yet to decide on a vocation. Cage and Sample became lovers and moved to L.A., where Cage had grown up. There, they connected with a high-school friend of Cage’s named Harry Hay, who also had literary ambitions and talked up a storm.

At the time, it was Sample who seemed poised for bigger things. His poetry and art work won praise, his conversation glittered. But it was the quiet-voiced, ostensibly straitlaced Cage who seized the world’s attention. After breaking up with Sample, at the end of 1934, Cage studied composition with the modernist master Arnold Schoenberg and began exploring new realms of sound. Within a couple of decades, he had established himself as a cynosure of the international avant-garde—the lord of noise, chance, and silence. By the end of the twentieth century, Hay, too, had acquired legendary status. In 1950, he spearheaded the Mattachine Society, which set in motion the modern American gay-rights movement. Sample, by contrast, slipped into near-total obscurity, his name appearing spectrally in books about Cage and Hay, sometimes in odd variants (Allen Sample, Alan Sample, Don St. Paul). No one knew what had happened to him, although for a long time there were rumors that he was still alive.

Recently, I set about trying to solve the seemingly marginal mystery of Don Sample. From personal papers, newspaper archives, immigration documents, census reports, oral histories, and autopsies, I pieced together a complicated, fragmentary portrait of a bad-boy aesthete, one who evolved from a teen-age delinquent into an arbiter of taste and a tutor of provocation. Sample helped to plot Cage’s trajectory toward the outer limits of art. He also made an impression on Hay, who, in his 1996 book, “Radically Gay,” wrote that “views and vistas had bubbled forth” from their conversations. The story of Sample’s life takes strange, sad turns, but it has a messy integrity, and it cries out to be rescued from oblivion.

“Don had bright, mischievous eyes in a scholarly-looking face,” Hay told his biographer, Stuart Timmons. “He wore little glasses and had a shock of lank hair that kept falling over his lenses; he looked very boyish, pushing it back all the time.” Cage, by contrast, seemed “at first very New England, very formal and buttoned-down in his three-piece suit and tie.” According to “The Trouble with Harry,” Timmons’s biography of Hay, from 1990, Cage’s reserve dissipated in the presence of Sample’s prickly, galvanizing spirit.

He was born William Donald McAteer Sample, on February 15, 1902, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. Sample’s father, William Sample, worked as an auditor for Westinghouse and U.S. Steel; his mother, Katherine McAteer, was an Irish immigrant’s daughter whose family had prospered in the steel industry. Sample’s uncle Howard McAteer was a deputy to Henry Frick at Carnegie Steel, became a yacht-owning millionaire, and founded the American Steel Export Company, dividing his time between Park Avenue and Pasadena. Myrtle June McAteer, another McAteer sibling, was a star tennis player who won the U.S. Open in 1900. She later took up singing, formed a professional (and probably personal) partnership with the actress Marguerite Fields, and settled in Southern California.

At Wilkinsburg High, Sample fell in with a sketchy crowd. In 1918, he and three other boys from what the Pittsburgh Press called “leading Wilkinsburg families” were arrested for robbing telephone pay stations. A few months later, Sample and his fellow-ruffian James McCauley were accused of stealing cars and going on joyrides; their chief accomplice this time was W. Emerson Logan, the son of a Westinghouse engineer. McCauley was sent to reform school; Logan progressed to armed bank robberies, his spree ending when he drew a revolver on a Philadelphia policeman and was stopped with a punch to the face. Sample avoided indictment for larceny and was charged only with receiving stolen goods. His parents dispatched him to Principia, a Christian Science boarding school in St. Louis, six hundred miles away.

Sample spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh and then wangled a transfer to Harvard, where he majored in literature and belonged to the Classical Club and the Poetry Society. By his final year, 1924-25, he was staying in an élite residence called Westmorly Court, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had lived a couple of decades earlier. Sample drew notice on campus for his poetry and was featured in a 1924 anthology of college students’ verse entitled “Poets of the Future.” His contribution, “Revere Beach,” is stiffly written but evocative:

                                                 A star appeared
Above the dying headlands. Searchlights seared
Far over sea the mist. From shore a stream—
Sweet, but unreal as ever in a dream—
Of music floated from the jewelled halls.

After receiving his undergraduate degree, in 1925, Sample remained at Harvard for three more years, studying law before returning to literature. He then moved to New York. The 1930 census shows a twenty-five-year-old Pennsylvania-born librarian named Don Sample living on Riverside Drive and Ninety-third Street—a short walk from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park, a celebrated gay cruising spot. Then, as one did, he went to Europe.

The six-foot-tall Angeleno lad whom Sample met in Capri was a characteristic product of early-twentieth-century Southern California, with its blend of hyper-capitalist energies and bohemian vibes. Cage’s father, John Milton Cage, Sr., was an ingenious, if never particularly successful, inventor, who developed a functional submarine, infrared-vision and color-television technologies, and a method for preventing lightning strikes on oil fields. His mother, Lucretia Harvey Cage, chronicled women’s clubs for the L.A. Times. Although Cage studied piano from an early age, his primary focus in high school was public speaking. At Los Angeles High, both Cage and Harry Hay, who was a year younger, joined a network of World Friendship Clubs, which the L.A. school system had set up to promote internationalist sentiments. In one World Friendship publication, you can find Cage extolling “International Patriotism” while Hay writes a song in praise of comradeship (“Awake! O ye world for the dawn is at hand”).

In 1928, at the precocious age of sixteen, Cage matriculated at Pomona College, east of L.A. There, he began to discover modern literature and art, his horizons widened by a professor, the art historian José Pijoán. In 1930, Pijoán brought the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco to the student dining hall to paint a mural of Prometheus. As it happens, Cage’s first same-sex experience was with one of Orozco’s muscular models. That summer, Cage dropped out and set off on a European tour, his expenses paid by his momentarily well-off parents.

It made sense for two young gay Americans to converge on Capri, which had won such fame as a gay oasis that a German author had published a pamphlet on the subject (“Capri und die Homosexuellen”). In a letter home, Cage leaves things vague: “I have been traveling with a chap I found in Capri. He comes from Pittsburgh and from Harvard College and a number of other places. He writes poetry which he refuses to have printed.” Once Cage and Sample became a couple, they toured other gay-friendly locales around the Mediterranean: Naples, Algeria, Majorca. They reëntered the U.S. on July 1, 1931, in Key West. Their final destination was Los Angeles.

Why not New York? Personal factors may have been at work: in L.A., Cage’s parents could provide support. But L.A. was also coming into its own as a cultural center. The Austrian-born architects R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra were building modernist residences, which Sample made a point of driving around to see. Schindler and his wife, the critic and editor Pauline Gibling Schindler, presided over a communal scene at their celebrated house on Kings Road, in West Hollywood. One Kings Road lodger, the gallerist and educator Galka Scheyer, was promoting a group of artists she called the Blue Four: Kandinsky, Feininger, Jawlensky, and Klee. The atmosphere was ripe for a new generation. Sample and Cage set about producing art in tandem and, in late 1931, mounted an exhibition at Scripps College. The following year, Sample had a solo show at the Santa Monica Public Library, winning a nod from the L.A. Times critic Arthur Millier (“sensitive little wood cuts, much influenced by the German modernist Klee”). Tracking the couple is made easier by the fact that L.A. newspapers were assiduous in reporting Cage’s movements—no doubt a result of his mother’s connections.

None of Sample’s art or poetry seems to survive, aside from his Harvard verses. But Pauline Schindler, a discerning judge of talent, thought highly of him. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that Sample’s poems showed the influence of E. E. Cummings but were “far more inward and utterly sincere . . . alive and strong and heavy with significance.” Cage and Sample, she went on, were “intellectual to the point of decadence, yet they’ll continue on, because of their inner vitality, into the emergent man who is now to come.”

In Majorca, Cage had taken up composing, and Sample encouraged him to continue. “Don was an excellent critic,” Hay said in an oral-history interview. “When John began to compose, Don was very careful that he moved him . . . in the directions he should be moving in.” Among other things, Sample introduced his young lover to the writing of James Joyce, which would have a huge effect on Cage’s mature work. In a 1987 conversation with Stuart Timmons, Cage recalled Sample as a “real disciplinarian” who made him work “three hours in the afternoon, two hours after supper.”

Harry Hay, the son of a mining engineer who had once worked for Cecil Rhodes, had a fine baritone voice, which Cage put to work in early performances of his music. Hay later remembered singing Cage’s “Greek Ode”—a setting, somewhat in the manner of Erik Satie, of a choral lament from Aeschylus’s “Persians”—before an audience at the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club. When I perused the Santa Monica Outlook, a paper that has been overlooked as a biographical source for Cage, I could find no such event, but I did notice Hay and Cage appearing together at a Junior Republican tea on November 6, 1932—a get-out-the-vote event for Herbert Hoover, who lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt two days later. Cage and Hay also gave a recital in conjunction with a lecture by W. F. Way, who discoursed on the need for a yacht harbor in Santa Monica. During a “benefit bridge tea” at the home of the lumber executive Ethelbert R. Maule, whose daughter Cornelia was a dancer and a pianist, Cage presented his music alongside Sample’s art.

By early 1933, Cage and Sample had moved into the Palama, a bungalow court in Santa Monica. Cage describes the place in his book “Silence,” omitting mention of Sample: “In exchange for doing the gardening, I got an apartment to live in and a large room back of the court over the garages, which I used as a lecture hall.” Stories in the Outlook show that Cage played and/or discussed the music of Satie, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Schulhoff, Toch, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. At an American-themed event, Cage played Gershwin’s “Preludes”—not exactly easy fare, and not the kind of repertory one would expect from the future composer of “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” for twelve radios. In later years, Cage characterized his patrons as “housewives,” but his audience was cultured and appreciative.

That fall, things got boisterous at the Schindler compound on Kings Road. A German-born film functionary named Eric Locke, a longtime associate of the great director Ernst Lubitsch, was occupying one of the studios in the complex, and, according to R. M. Schindler’s correspondence, “two friends” moved in with him. These friends may have been Sample and Cage. In a 1992 conversation with the architectural historian Thomas Hines—the only interview in which the composer discussed his sexuality with any frankness—Cage mentioned that by 1933 his relationship with Sample had become an open one, and that the two were involved with a Hollywood figure who was living at Kings Road.

In early 1934, Cage and Sample passed through various alternative enclaves up the coast, including the beach town of Oceano, where Gavin Arthur, the radical-leaning, astrologically inclined, bisexual grandson of President Chester A. Arthur, oversaw a community of artists, poets, and dropouts in the dunes. Sample began calling himself Donald St. Paul, for whatever reason, and made plans to study with the photographer Edward Weston, as the Carmel Pine Cone reported. Cage, meanwhile, hoped to become a pupil of the mighty Schoenberg, who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and was teaching in Boston. To prepare for the challenge, Cage decided to move to New York to study with Schoenberg’s student Adolph Weiss. In the spring of 1934, Sample joined Cage on a cross-country trip. The two travelled hobo-style, jumping aboard boxcars. Cage mentioned this adventure when Calvin Tomkins profiled him for The New Yorker in 1964, but, again, Sample was omitted from the narrative.

In New York, the dynamic of the relationship changed. At first, Sample had been the dominant force; now, Cage’s elfin charisma was shining brighter. The younger man made a splash in Virgil Thomson’s circle and had a fling with Philip Johnson. In December, Cage and Sample drove across the country once again, this time in the company of the composer Henry Cowell. Schoenberg had moved to L.A., and Cage was following him there. The trio stopped in Santa Fe, where the New Mexican took notice of them. Donald St. Paul, the paper said, was a “painter who plans to stay for some time.” In the end, Sample completed the journey to L.A., but he went to live in San Fernando while Cage moved back in with his parents. Cage wrote in a letter to a friend, “I was sorry that Don changed his mind about Santa Fe.” The relationship was ending.

To be gay in the mid-thirties was no easy thing. The relative sexual permissiveness of the Prohibition era had given way to a backlash. The book designer Ward Ritchie, who had visited Cage and Sample in Majorca, recalled that Cage’s parents objected to their son’s boyfriend, whether or not they perceived him as such. Perhaps Cage also wished to assume a mantle of respectability as he began his studies with Schoenberg, at U.S.C. In any case, his desires swung toward the heterosexual. He had an affair with Pauline Schindler, sending her florid love letters. He also pursued the sculptor Xenia Kashevaroff, and married her in June, 1935. Hay describes an awkward encounter at the newlyweds’ home: “John would not let me in and would not say why. He spoke to me at the back porch. It was very awkward, and I finally left. I could only guess I looked too—obvious.” Hay deemed the marriage a “loss of integrity” on Cage’s part. To be sure, Hay himself got married in 1938, in part to conform to the expectations of his Communist comrades.

Sample was the one who made no attempt to pass. In the mid-thirties, according to Hay, he was arrested on a morals charge in De Longpre Park, a favored cruising ground that has long featured a memorial to Rudolph Valentino. Sample, suffering from skin sores, was nursed by Hay’s mother, Margaret. He later moved into a house in Laurel Canyon that acquired the nickname Homo Hollow, as Timmons reveals in “The Trouble with Harry.” The dancer Helen Johnson Gorog evoked the scene for Timmons: “Don had cultivated a salon of all sorts of people—from the adventurous to the pretentious. Parties there would start Friday night and end sometime Monday or Tuesday, whenever people had to crawl off to work. That house had great suspended ceiling beams, and I remember Don walking barefoot across them every time he got drunk enough.” Curiously, Schoenberg once paid a visit to Homo Hollow, attending a dinner party given by the composer and educator David Patterson, who had a studio at the same address. That night, however, there was no drunken cavorting on the beams.

Cage did well in Schoenberg’s classes, but he rebelled against the master’s strictures regarding thematic development and harmonic variety, instead embracing the medium of percussion, in which harmony is largely beside the point. His first percussion concert took place at the home of the artist Hazel Dreis and the dancer Edward McLean, in Santa Monica, where the pair ran a bookbinding commune. A 1937 Outlook article, titled “Music Takes Strange Form,” describes how the bookbinders were making music from a garden hoe, scissors, a flyswatter, and cooking utensils. Cage is quoted as saying, “The Hindus have made great progress in rhythm, but in the West, from the time of Bach to the present, there has been absolutely no new development in this field.” There, unmistakably, is the voice of the avant-garde guru to come. In 1938, Cage went north to Seattle and then proceeded to the Bay Area, Chicago, and, finally, New York. When, in 1943, he mounted a percussion concert at MOMA, Life granted him two pages, between Navy boxers and a South African witch doctor. The Age of Cage had begun.

After the breakup, the lovers had little to no contact. Hay, who kept in touch with Sample for a number of years, didn’t remember Cage’s name coming up. Trying to reconstruct a life from scattered traces is hazardous, but it seems as though Sample found a degree of stability in the later thirties. He got a job editing instructional bulletins for the California Department of Education, collaborating with a singular woman named Vocha Fiske, who had danced with Ruth St. Denis and acted in Pilgrimage Plays at the Hollywood Bowl before earning a master’s in education from U.S.C. Fiske specialized in general semantics, and Sample assisted her on a W.P.A.-funded project that sought to standardize speech-arts curricula in the state’s schools, employing people who had been laid off during the Depression.

If, as seems likely, Sample fell out with most of his family, he remained close to his aunt Myrtle June McAteer, who had come out West with Marguerite Fields, in 1935, stayed briefly in a Schindler apartment in Silver Lake, and then taken up residence in the San Fernando Valley. McAteer, having switched from tennis to classical singing, gave lessons and directed a church choir. Sample lodged with McAteer and Fields in the late thirties and early forties. The Santa Monica Outlook tells us that Sample also kept in touch with Cornelia Maule, who, in 1936, invited him to her house to give a talk on “Modern Phases of Art Forms.”

Trouble appeared, in the form of a handsome, hard-drinking young New Mexican named Jack Hening. In 1940, Sample and Hening were sharing an apartment in Hollywood; Hening’s draft card lists Don Sample in the field for “Person Who Will Always Know Your Address.” Hening, the son of a newspaper and magazine publisher, had studied bacteriology and served as a pathologist with the U.S. Army Medical Service. For a time, he lived in Gavin Arthur’s Oceano colony; then he drifted up to San Francisco, working as a hotel porter. Sample went north in the same period, taking a post as an English teacher at the San Rafael Military Academy. If there was a relationship between the two, it did not last. In 1946, Hening went on a fatal bender with two men named Menypenny and Megirt. In a room at the Mint Hotel, in San Francisco, Hening fell onto a radiator valve and received a wound that penetrated the left eye through to the brain. Or so the coroner surmised. The incident has the earmarks of the kind of thing that, in those days, the police did not bother to investigate.

Bereft or not, Sample returned to Southern California. A 1948 voting list places him at a medical building in Downey, California—presumably the Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center, which was known for polio care but handled many other conditions. This suggests that Sample’s health was in decline. In the fifties, he could be found in the Valley, no longer actively employed, possibly housebound. He died of heart failure on February 24, 1964. The death certificate in the records of the California Department of Public Health states that he had been suffering for ten years from “spastic paralysis”—suggesting a stroke, multiple sclerosis, or some other degenerative disease. Such an end may sound bleak, yet the evidence is far too scant to draw any conclusions. Perhaps Sample brooded over his losses and unfulfilled ambitions; perhaps he enjoyed lively company to the end.

By the mid-sixties, Cage had become a global celebrity, his influence extending from Boulez to the Beatles. After the demise of his marriage to Kashevaroff, he settled into a decades-long partnership with Merce Cunningham, who provided a gentle counterpoint to his smoldering intellect. (The image of Cage as an unflappable sage is deceptive, as I argued in a 2010 article.) Although Cage lived openly with Cunningham, he shied away from identifying himself as gay. Only in interviews at the end of his life did he begin to speak more candidly. As the critic and Cage scholar Mark Swed recently suggested to me, the composer may have sensed that his time was limited and that he should reveal more of himself.

In the wake of Cage’s death came another odd twist. Stories began circulating in musicological circles that Sample was still alive and living under an assumed name in France. He was said to have accumulated a storehouse of Cage material, including unknown manuscripts. Those stories reached Hay, who lived until 2002, long enough to be hailed as a gay-rights pioneer. Hay wrote briefly about Cage and Sample in “Radically Gay,” comparing the relationship, in his customarily florid way, to Alexander the Great’s love for Hephaestion. Correspondence in the Hay archive at the San Francisco Public Library shows that Hay hoped to send a copy of the book to Sample, not realizing that the latter had been dead for more than thirty years. Memories of Sample’s boldness lingered in Hay’s mind.

Cage, too, seemed a little haunted by the man who had picked him up on Capri and schooled him in all things modern. He wrote to Timmons in 1987: “When did he die? How old was he? Where did he die?” In 1992, in his conversation with Hines, Cage spoke briefly about Sample before assuming his customary mask of benign diffidence. “I don’t think I’m faithful emotionally,” Cage said. “I don’t think I am faithful about my emotions.” When Hines asked what he meant, Cage replied, “I don’t know, but what I’m trying to say is that my concern is with all the things that you see on my public side and which are, so to speak, in no sense emotional. But, if you ask, as you just did, where is Don Sample, I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive.” ♦

Your story “The Welfare State” follows two women who have been friends, living in the same small town in Bavaria, for two decades, as they take a walk along the peak of Mt. Niesen, in the Swiss Alps. The two characters are very different, both in background and in personality. What made this mountain peak the ideal spot for their differences to come to a head?

I should say up front that I don’t write this stuff. It comes to me unbidden, the way every sentence I speak does. Imagine if I had to search for the words among eighty-six billion neurons! I had to do that once when I went into a catatonic fugue state while defending my dissertation to a jury of stern professors, and once when I was on some really bad acid, and, believe me, it’s not how you get a reputation for being articulate. So they (the neurons) got together and decided that high ground in a rich, neutral country is the best place to set a summit meeting. They weren’t the first to come to that conclusion! Moreover—I must thank my friend Ian Christe, the great Swiss American heavy-metal critic, for both these points—Switzerland is so beautiful that there’s a subreddit devoted to exposing it as computer-generated art (“SwitzerlandIsFake”), and yet on every single hiking trail, no matter how harmless it looks on the map, there comes a moment when one wonders whether one is about to die.

Julia is American, more rigid, less carefree and open than Vroni, who is German. This is, in some ways, the inverse of the usual stereotypes. Has your own experience proved those stereotypes wrong?

My favorite stereotype is the one where Germans think Americans are prudish. I’ve lived in Germany since 2000, and I remember the first time I saw “Sex and the City” in the original. It was so gratingly vulgar. In Germany, I’d apparently been watching a bowdlerized edit, halfway to the Saudi version. I’d say that Vroni isn’t open; she’s an educated German with a head full of knowledge, unwilling to repeat herself. Americans like to talk about things they have in common. Given the current political and religious situations in the U.S., they can’t even make small talk with friends anymore—it’s more like micro-talk. Yet they will have the most intense personal conversations with strangers they’re sure they’ll never see again. Julia is not amused that Vroni felt free to marry a philanderer who loves kids, rather than someone hardworking and faithful, but her notions of women’s and children’s needs were formed by her own experiences. The two of them occupy the same world, but they register it on different frequencies. I should point out that Vroni is from Catholic Bavaria, while Julia—like most American Wasps—is psychologically more of a Prussian. Catholics, like Orthodox Jews, believe that God wants your good deeds and the performance of certain rituals and isn’t that interested in what goes on in your head. Martin Luther’s big breakthrough was sola fide, the origin of today’s dainty capitalist egos.

The story implies that Vroni’s carefree existence is possible because she lives in a “welfare state,” where the government supports child care, education, housing, and so on, and thus there is less pressure to earn and climb in a career, and children can be somewhat left to raise themselves. Is that your take on life in Germany, too?

Germany is a more patriarchal, more ageist, less free country than the U.S., but a little constitutional commitment to human dignity goes a long way. Unlimited education for all who qualify is crucial to maintaining the level of public discourse, as well as the quality of public services. By “less free” I mean, for instance, that federal law here mandates rent stabilization and even something resembling unionization. It’s hard to evict or fire anyone, and wages in fields with vulnerable workers are regulated (along with payments to veterinarians, estate lawyers, and other potential extortionists). The lack of an open market gives workers leverage, and women often use it to reduce their hours in harmony with the short school days here, rather than to raise their income. Day care is sparse, because of stringent licensing requirements. But now I’m reminding myself of a German friend who warned an American friend’s trans child against moving here because of Germany’s “creeping fascism.” If it’s creeping here, what’s it doing over there—galloping? Poor people struggle in Germany, but from a relatively comfy platform, child care aside.

I don’t want to give away the last scene of the story for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, so I’ll just say that it comes as a completely unexpected shock to Julia. Why do you think Julia fails to read the room, so to speak, and doesn’t realize that her view of things isn’t shared by those around her?

She’s always known that there’s a disconnect between her and Vroni, but that’s common enough in friendships, unless you socialize exclusively with like-minded people from your own milieu. The paradox is that, when you’re not just nodding and smiling about unfamiliar emotions but truly trying to comprehend them, you’re probably forcing square pegs into round holes. If Vroni published a novel, of course, Julia would be off the hook. Any reader can buy access to literary writers’ minds for the price of a library card and then give them one-star reviews for not being relatable. But Vroni’s just trying to live her life. Because Julia cares about her enough to identify with her, she’s torn between expressing her concerns and simply being a helpful friend.

Should we take it as both literal and metaphorical that, on the mountaintop, Julia feels as if she were about to fall into an abyss while Vroni bounds around like a chamois, fully convinced of her own safety?

Right now all my American pals who aren’t retirement age are afraid of losing their jobs. They work in fields that are downsizing, like journalism, social work, and global-health advocacy. Many own guns, which they keep loaded and within reach when I’m sleeping in their homes, to my extremely amazed trepidation. Julia’s first instinct is to fear the unknown, because life in America can be over so fast, both figuratively and literally. One little tax-evasion case goes against you, one mug shot for an alleged misdemeanor, and you’re unemployable, at least if you have an unusual name like mine. In Germany, you can discreetly serve time for murder—generally fifteen years, with time off for good behavior—which cuts down on your motivation to take out as many people as possible in one fell swoop, before turning the gun on yourself. I say that Julia consumes news stories—which contributes to her anxiety—and happy-go-lucky Vroni doesn’t, but the unpredictability in the U.S. is getting close enough to touch. My friends in Philly had a neighbor shot to death by a fourteen-year-old in front of their house, followed by a mass shoot-out between two teen cliques at the local dog run, and the weirdest thing happened when I was in Virginia in October: I was at an old friend’s house way out in the woods, and someone came during the night and stole about fifty ripe tomatoes out of the garden. We were planning to can them the next day. I guess Americans are back to doing food heists like hobos.

Tell me about the genesis of this story. Several months ago, I asked if you were writing short fiction, and very quickly there was a draft of a story in my inbox. Did these characters already exist in your mind? Had you been planning to write this narrative?

In all my gallivanting around Germany since 1983, I’ve only ever met one sex worker, a charming dyslexic who had moved here from the Balkans, with her working-class parents, at sixteen. In the years after she flunked out of school, prostitution was still nominally criminalized—the market hadn’t yet been flooded with teen-agers on work visas in huge brothels—and she could make a living by meeting select clients in the afternoons. She said it compared favorably with her other options as an illiterate young woman, and I believe her. She wasn’t a member of my social circle; I met her at a Prostitution Working Group meeting of the Baden-Württemberg Green Party. In the U.S. context, I can’t talk or write about the backgrounds of the sex workers I’ve known without outing friends and colleagues. And far be it from me to imply that it’s a less-than-ideal side gig. American sex workers are an even scarier organized affinity group than translators. (I mean scary in the social-media sense—I’m not saying that their wrath is physically hazardous.) One does not disparage their choices, or suggest that prostitution is perhaps not the oldest profession. (Historically, it has become common in times and places with dramatic wealth gaps and relevant limits on enslavement.) So there I was, intent on cranking out a short story overnight, preferably on an urgent topic that had been conveniently knocking around in my brain for eons, but without mentioning the topic itself, because who needs that can of worms. I asked the neurons, “What might a wild woman free from urgent economic pressures do with her life, other than fail to annoy me with stock rationalizations about how men traditionally package emotional labor as cash, and how dates with finance bros in New York are the same routine whether or not you’re getting a thousand bucks and a late checkout with room service?”

Your most recent novel, “Sister Europe,” was published earlier this year. It’s set in Berlin and takes place entirely in one night in the lives of its characters. Which do you prefer writing—novels or stories? Which do you prefer reading?

I’ve written six novels since I started publishing, and three stories. I’d say the evidence speaks for itself. There are a couple of canonic stories that my B.F.F.s and I refer to at regular intervals: “Five Letters from an Eastern Empire,” by Alasdair Gray, and “The Winter Journey,” by Georges Perec. I admit I’ve never gotten through an Alasdair Gray novel. When people can’t really write but have good ideas, I prefer that they keep it short. But my favorite authors write so well and copiously that I can happily keep going for eight hundred pages. I’m not counting Robert Walser as a short-story writer. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of his miniatures, but, as he himself said, they’re all vignettes from one big “Ich-Buch”—like Dr. Seuss’s “My Book About Me by ME Myself,” only longer. ♦

The world beyond the ridgetop was a wall of gray cloud. One could look down to the left or the right at a forty-five-degree angle and see only gray. From the mist came loud moos and the clatter of cowbells. The American was too frightened to move.

She had felt cheerful on the sheltered concrete of the viewing platform, relaxed on the broad stairway with its sturdy bannister, and well enough on the roadlike path that looped behind the reassuring mass of the restaurant. The narrowing, roughening, and horizon-lowering that had turned that path into this trail had been gradual. Now its quality of teetering in space made her want to get on her knees and crawl.

The ground, composed of loose grit and softball-size rocks, was visibly wet. Her German friend Vroni was already twenty yards ahead.

Crouching to lower her center of gravity, Julia took three short steps and halted. She cocked her wrists to catch herself if she fell, and stood up half straight. Time to decelerate and deepen her breathing. “Slow down!” she called out.

Vroni turned on a dime and came back, bounding like a chamois. She stood before Julia, casually shifting her weight around, her beanie pushed back over her hazelnut hair, her questioning eyes an opaque brown. For all the exertion and the cold, her skin tone was even and yellowish, like a chain-smoker’s, although she wasn’t one. She rolled her own cigarettes to save money; this took time, and couldn’t be done non-stop, so the spots on her teeth did not entirely match her eyes.

The pink, patrician Julia, with her irreproachably healthy life style, swayed stiffly in an awkward squat, red-cheeked and trembling. She flattered herself that she liked to leap and romp, but that was only on even surfaces such as lawns and sandy beaches, where the appropriate animal comparison would be to a clumsy calf. For reasons of her own (osteopenia), she romped where it was safe to fall down. There being no courage without fear, she preferred activities that entailed neither. She routinely wore a helmet and gloves when riding a bicycle, and she had recently refused a ride in a glamorous classic car because it lacked shoulder belts and headrests. Just the other day, she had given her cowardice a workout on a Ferris wheel in Thun. When the gondola commenced to rise, she had slid to the floor and hugged its central pillar. By the third revolution, however, she was back on her seat, reassured that the bolt attaching her gondola to the wheel (there were countless bolts in the wheel to allow it to be dismantled for transport, but only the one above the gondola seemed to hold her life in its hands) was an inch and a half in diameter and smooth, without visible rust.

The ridge that she and Vroni were on now was literally the ground—a well-trodden promenade through a pasture, thick with footprints. She made a vain attempt to justify her poor attitude toward the perfect safety of (here she looked around, mentally checking her notes) the vertiginously inclined planes at whose apex she perched, flanked by a surging, abyssal void. “In the mountains one time with Wolfgang—” she began.

Immediately Vroni’s expression turned skeptical. She, of course, knew Wolfgang, a man from a verdant river valley among low hills, where elderly people took long strolls with their wheeled walkers and tiny children rode bicycles. “Wolfgang!” she scoffed.

Each could contextualize nearly anything the other said, because they had lived for many years in the same small town in Bavaria. They knew dozens, if not hundreds, of people in common; they knew each other’s professors, exes, friends, and favored bartenders. Vroni’s husband, a provincial snob and devoted reader of Casanova, had been known as such to Julia—and liable to flirt with her, despite his friendship with Wolfgang—long before Vroni came on the scene.

“I tried to get him to walk a trail like this,” Julia insisted, “and he was, like, No way! Because on a steep hill where it’s grass instead of rocks, when you trip, there’s nothing to break your fall. You just keep sliding all the way to the bottom!”

“That’s not true,” Vroni said. “A person who’s rolling is conical and top-heavy. I could fling myself down this mountain right now, and I’d just roll in a little circle and stop with my head pointing downhill. Want me to show you?” She stood at the edge of the trail, looking eagerly downward.

Julia said no, firmly.

But the claim was plausible enough, and Vroni’s faith in it seemed based in experience. The peak they were on, the Niesen, was famous for resembling a pyramid when viewed from Lake Thun, and Julia had assumed that if she slipped she would slide five thousand feet down its slick ramps, to be impaled by spiky larch branches. Accepting now that she would come to rest near the trail and be helped to her feet by Vroni, she stood up straight.

She rotated a hundred and eighty degrees on her axis to admire the restaurant behind her. A gust of wind rudely shoved a shred of cloud in front of it, so she turned back to Vroni. It was mid-July, eight o’clock in the morning, and the temperature on the summit was slightly above freezing. Mountains of jagged stone and permafrost lay to the south behind a vast shroud of droplets, obscuring the still rising sun.

The women were ill-prepared for the cold—Julia because she hadn’t expected it, and Vroni because she’d known it wouldn’t last. Thus Julia was conspicuous in a brand-new, radiantly cerulean zippered hoodie bearing the mountain’s logo, a bargain in the gift shop at thirty francs, about half what she would have imagined paying for a sweatshirt in Switzerland. Vroni wore a flimsy cotton cardigan over a silk shirt of indeterminate color. It might have been off-white once, or a dim yellow, stained by washing in rusty water. The rotting silk gaped open at the seams. Julia assumed that Vroni had found it in the trash after a flea market. Her little backpack had been inherited from her children—brand-name hiking gear adorably miniaturized, with many zippers—because the German government helped her pay for school supplies. There was nothing in it now but smoking equipment and a canteen.

It occurred to Julia that she had a small blanket with her. It was a castoff from her parents, decades old, a membership premium from the American Legion in navy-blue fleece with the embroidered slogan “Freedom Is Not Free.” It was a prized possession, among the most useful items she’d ever owned, like the towel that galactic hitchhikers are advised to take along by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Since she always kept it in the bottom of her day pack, she had forgotten all about it. She handed it to Vroni, who wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl.

Vroni was poor. Her drab, conservative home village in the plains southeast of Regensburg had lost its train station before she was born. Its surroundings were, by Bavarian standards, exceptionally flat. She had migrated at the age of eighteen to their picturesque and desirable university town the way an American runaway might fetch up in an R.V. encampment in the desert. She had studied ethnography, consciously broadening her horizons. Her field studies had taken her to Central Asia.

Julia was better off, a freelance translator of internal communications for suppliers to the automotive industry, who did occasional literary translation projects in her spare time. She had not saved up to come to the Niesen; she had qualified for a literary-translating conference in Thun and, when she realized that the organizers had booked her a double room, had invited Vroni to join her. The closest Julia had ever come to field work in the East was an excursion to Prague, where she’d gotten into a stilted conversation about work with some cleaners.

Their minds were very different. Julia read fiction and talked about the news, while Vroni read classics of societal analysis (a favorite was Marilyn Strathern’s “The Gender of the Gift”) and talked about her own life. Vroni seemed to Julia never to have consumed a mass medium of any kind. She had no internet at home, for the sake of the children. When she needed to look something up, she went to her office.

Julia had longed to be an educated mother like Vroni, but there was never a serviceable father in view, so she had limited herself to being educated, first as an autodidact—via unsystematic reading of primary material, the classic works of fiction and philosophy—and then by moving to Germany, where knowledge could be acquired tuition-free. She began too late. She’d misapprehended the nature of ivory-tower research, choosing secondary sources that had been disregarded in their own fields for decades. She would never be taken seriously as an academic. But she had been cautious around her inadequate boyfriends and had never once had a pregnancy scare, so that was something.

“Pregnancy scare” was a term impossible to connect with Vroni, who had carelessly gotten pregnant at age twenty-two and married the Casanova expert. She easily obtained scholarships for her interesting and useful research. The family received hundreds of euros per child per month from the state, no strings attached, and it was much more than they needed. They shared a small apartment heated with firewood stolen from the municipal forest. When the heap of cash in the cigar box on the kitchen table had attained a value of forty thousand euros, they’d given it to Julia, who had deposited it in her bank account as though it were an interest-free private loan. Then Vroni and the louche aficionado of Enlightenment sexual mores found a large house so historic that the state would pay them to renovate it, and Julia returned the money to them for use as a down payment.

Through three more pregnancies and her husband’s impregnation of three other women with five additional children, Vroni remained happily married, and she was married to him to this day. Of course, people would tell her to leave that libertinage-loving slob, and she’d stop talking to them, regarding them henceforth as ignorant bigots. He might be off getting some random person pregnant after a night out, but meanwhile she was avidly seducing a hot exchange student or banging the next-door neighbor. They were an attentive, caring team, kind to every child that arose. The other moms were nothing special, Vroni said, but it was so much fun, having babies around that weren’t her responsibility, like having grandchildren. Her own children had stopped being pliant angels long ago, but the darling babies kept pouring in, tirelessly fed and diapered by the vain dandy.

Julia’s opinion of Vroni’s husband was checkered, to say the least. She rather hated him and felt sure that he would one day leave Vroni—the only parent involved who had a job—and demand alimony.

Vroni maintained that her form of marriage had been accepted in many times and places, and that her husband was not as unusual as one might think. All the children were brilliant and beautiful, and soon enough they were independent, cooking for themselves and making their own arrangements, although they could not be prevailed upon to clean anything, ever. But they were such good children, peacefully playing amid the disorder while she opened a bottle of wine, rolled cigarettes, and reviewed the events of the day with the willfully unemployed lover of all things Venetian.

How different Vroni would have been as a penniless rebel with brains who was born American, Julia thought. The penniless American rebels she knew were undereducated and desperate, turning to irrational notions after their meagre baccalaureates, and the stress of their lives made them sick, no matter how little they smoked and drank. The Germans were like Vroni, rebelling by failing to finish their job training (in Vroni’s case, a doctorate), so that they had to learn new trades. Vroni had become a packaging designer. Every morning she commuted twenty minutes by train to a cosmetics factory, where she came up with new ways of folding cardboard, but only until noon; the job was part time.

Julia walked with her head high, at a normal pace, confident now that the slope beside her would serve as a safety net like the one that enfolded Vroni—the German welfare state. Vroni pulled the blanket close, trapping her warmth in its one-person free world.

The day grew brighter, and Julia began to take stock of the flower situation, which was hard-core. The pastures were scattered with gentians. Their vivid, indelible blue (a person had to be careful not to sit on them) reminded her of something a famous war reporter she knew had told her—that deep in Afghanistan, guarded by difficult terrain and hostile clans, there are mountains so rich in lapis lazuli that they sparkle blue in sunlight. Walking the rugged, uneven trail, she told Vroni this story. It was one she especially liked because no one she told it to had ever believed it. The faithful consisted only of her and the reporter.

But why wouldn’t it be true? A diamond mine in South Africa a hundred years ago was a bunch of guys finding diamonds like Easter eggs on the ground. The hawksbill sea turtles with their valuable, beautiful shells used to come ashore in crowds of forty thousand. Rivers back then sometimes held more delicious salmon than they held water. Why shouldn’t there be semiprecious mountains hidden in remote and inaccessible tribal lands? Why were people so adamant about the superiority of today’s world? She sketched her views on the subject while Vroni walked ahead.

Vroni agreed that the world was a two-edged sword. She didn’t believe in the blue mountains, either. She showed Julia some anemones that had gone to seed, pointing out that the flower in bloom is just like a pretty poppy, but once the petals fall it becomes an alien-looking gray pompom. This was why sea anemones were called anemones! It made sense! They crouched to admire the mute flowers that had given their name to animals in the ocean. The clouds ascending skyward on waves of thermals suddenly parted like a curtain. A majestic rocky peak appeared, outlined in blazing snow.

They stood to watch. The curtain closed again. Continuing along the ridge, which was no longer crowned by the trail in an unnerving way but rose next to it, they saw that a certain pair of flattish, dry rocks would be good for sitting on. Julia unpacked their picnic, turning around again and again to scan the enormous display of clouds, mountains, wildflowers, and sun. The light of day arrived on the ridge. All was transfigured, silver and gold. Droplets lay on the leaves like jewels. A thousand hues of green quivered in the breeze, the tiny leaves of meadow plants dappling one another with their shade. Vroni rolled a cigarette and, more than half an hour later, rolled a second one, stowing her leavings in an antique portable ashtray made of metal and leather. And so they passed the time while the earth turned and the sun climbed, warming the air.

Once, years earlier, Vroni had related—while painting her high-walled kitchen with the aid of a stepladder on a table—an anecdote so magnificent that Julia still retailed its highlights to other friends, as though summarizing the plot of a movie. In essence, as Julia remembered it, Vroni had been walking decorously, part of a group of ethnographers headed to a remote Kazakh archeological site, when a venomous snake flung itself out of the underbrush and bit her in the shin. Everyone agreed that this was a freakish event and not her fault. At first, her colleagues assumed that she could walk back to town, but soon they were carrying her. When she passed out, they began to run. She awoke in the hospital, near death. The professor who had been leading the excursion sat by her bed, drenched in tears, holding her cold hand. She asked Vroni for contact information for her parents.

“No!” Vroni cried, adrenaline coursing through her. “They’re the last people on earth I want to see!” She had gone to university to get away from their narrow-minded world of religious prejudice, which she regarded as incipiently fascist, like all systems that consign the living to damnation. She indicated that, rather than entertain her professor while she was dying, much less her parents, husband, or children, she would like to be alone with Aslan, a local shepherd, whose voice could be heard clearly through the door. The professor was visibly perturbed. Vroni could read her mind, which was thinking, We’ve been here for all of, what, four days, and already you want to die in the arms of your unethical relationship with the subject of my field work? Vroni traced the end of her serious chance at an academic career to that moment when she hurt the sad professor’s feelings. Her very vitality—surviving the lethal snake bite; having Aslan lock the door behind him while they got it on; refusing the amputation of her leg, which recovered fully—suggested to her colleagues that she might be an indestructible subhuman, or at least sub-academic.

On the mountain, Vroni and Julia told stories about washed-out bridges, snow bridges, snowstorms, rainstorms, walking on highways, hiking at night, man-eating stray dogs in Greece, a dog named Gelert who passed as a saint, and the Irish monk St. Gall, who returned Christianity to Europe from its western fringes, where it had been driven by invading Central Asians, a topic that died on the vine, having been gravely misrecollected by Julia. Vroni was visibly bored. She talked about the resurgence of bride kidnapping after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nowadays the practice took the form of orchestrated rape, she said, but, before seventy years of Communism, it had been a relatively benign tradition. A man who couldn’t afford to buy his girlfriend would steal her, and everyone was happy except her parents, who had fed her for fifteen years for nothing.

The herd of hungry young polled beef cattle that had greeted them through the mist was moving closer, munching audibly amid the din of bells. Vroni suggested that they continue walking along the ridge and take the trail down the mountain, instead of riding the funicular.

Julia had her doubts, partly because she was wearing sneakers, and partly because she had bought them both round-trip funicular tickets. She was not as poor as Vroni, but she was not rich enough to waste expensive tickets.

They agreed to wait and see if some hikers coming the other way might be prepared to report on conditions down below.

When a pair finally arrived, clad in bright rain gear with walking sticks, their boots told the whole story: the mud on the trail was ankle deep and slippery. The men soon moved on toward the restaurant, intent on eating lunch and then putting miles behind them, with the long descent ahead.

Julia and Vroni strolled back along the ridge, through frequent flashes of sunshine. They came around an outcropping to find the cattle herd loudly blocking the trail. Clang, ding, thump, munch, moo, a dense throng of lunks.

“I bet you know how to make them move,” Julia optimistically assured Vroni. There was no question that Vroni, a child of a rural area filled with similar animals, had more expertise in the livestock realm. She dispatched herself to clear a path.

To Julia’s surprise, she walked right up to a brawny steer’s shoulder and attempted to push it off the trail as though it were a pygmy goat. It pushed back with its nose, knocking her off her feet. She landed softly on her rear and elbows and immediately stood up again, laughing. But the beast was half wild. Vroni was too small to play its pushing game. It would win.

Instead the women moved uphill from the blocked trail, sidling along just below the ridgeline, well away from the massive cattle, which they hoped would stay put.

They stood on tiptoe to peer over the top, which was adorned with tufts of grass like a fringe. Just beyond their noses was a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Two shining lakes and three big cities nestled in broad valleys below. They watched as cloud curtains opened and closed.

Julia said, “This is so pretty.” She thought, This is life at its best. To be touched by fear, but not afraid in the least. This is what Americans are looking for when they obsessively watch horror movies and war videos: the sublime! Compulsively walking the valley of the shadow of death, when fear can dwell amid clouds and flowers.

Vroni was racing toward the restaurant like a snow leopard to get them a table before the lunch rush. Julia envied her. She would have felt so much smarter if she’d stayed in America, without highly educated friends who intimidated her. By rights she should have gotten an associate’s degree in hospitality management in Cincinnati, and taken up bloviating about NIMBYs, kinbaku, and “socialism” (the American name for progressive taxation), after meals of CBD gummies that she needed for her pain. But she loved her life. She wondered why she hadn’t shared her insight about the sublime with Vroni. Because it was dumb and naïve? How could feelings be dumb? Where was this sneaking sense of doom and nullity coming from? From the clouds? The cold? The eerie view over the ridge, seeing the land of counterpane through a screen of flowers, inches from death? That had to be it. The fear hormones were still acting on her, but she wasn’t looking at beauty anymore. She was alone on the trail, watching her step, imagining how bored Vroni would have been by her revelation.

She had read somewhere that it’s impossible to feel fear when your hands are holding something warm. Freedom may not be free, but hot chocolate in a vortex of terror is five francs, tops. She bought herself a hot chocolate at the restaurant. Vroni said she didn’t want anything.

“There’s something I want to say,” Vroni said, after they sat down. “I’m sick and tired of you.” She unwrapped the blanket from her shoulders and wadded it up, like worthless trash, to hand it back to Julia.

Julia gulped, coughed, and said, “What?”

“I feel as if I know nothing about you, but you keep wanting to get closer, demanding more. You’re possessive and judgmental, but you act like I’m in charge, like with those cattle just now. Our conversations are so superficial. I want to have real friends. I’ve tried with you. I’m a polite person, so I know I’m surprising you, but I don’t think we should see each other again. I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a long time, almost twenty years. Something about your making me come here makes it easy.” Vroni gestured toward the emptiness beyond the windows. “I wish you all good things, but I don’t want to know what ‘good’ means to you.” She waited for a reaction. Then she took off her cap to comb out her dull, dusty mane with dirty fingers stained brown, killing time with desultory self-care as though unobserved. She tucked her hair up again and took a swig of water from the canteen in her bag.

Julia stared. Had Vroni lost her marbles? Was this what people were asking for when they complained about being ghosted—an explicit jilting, rich in memorable detail? If Vroni’s independent, pragmatic mind differed greatly from her own, as she sincerely believed it did and had always found to be a big plus, it might never be possible for her to comprehend what Vroni had just said. Or anything else, either. The whole world might be functionally a hallucination—that was what cognitive neuroscience said. A hallucination with pointy tentacles.

She held her hot chocolate with both hands and said nothing for a good long while before asking, “Are you going straight home?”

Vroni plunked a five-franc coin on the table and said, “Buy yourself another hot chocolate.”

She clomped away toward the exit, shedding mud as she went.

Julia later saw her napping on a lounger outside, but she didn’t try to wake her. She returned by train to the room in Thun, where there was no trace of her former friend, who hadn’t even packed a change of clothes. Vroni’s toothbrush was a disposable one from the hotel reception. She had vanished, propelled by repressed hatred. Who knew.

But Vroni appears happier than ever now, and when Julia sees her around town she is cheered by the lasting conviction that she has absolutely no idea what is going on in anybody’s little pea brain. She once had a whole theory about Vroni, but that’s over. What was Vroni’s rejection of her all about? Vroni ignores her, and Julia will never know.

Wolfgang thinks that Vroni always had a screw loose. He says he wouldn’t roll down a grassy mountain if you paid him. ♦

During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.”

Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better.” Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: “If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”

Liebling took over The Wayward Press, a column in the magazine, in which he prosecuted the sins and miscues of the Fourth Estate, which he labelled “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Although he was terribly nearsighted, out of shape, and plagued by gout (his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell once observed him using a strip of bacon as a bookmark), his vigorous coverage of D Day and the liberation of Paris led the French government to award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Untidy in his personal life, he was on his third wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, when he died, at the age of fifty-nine.

Liebling’s foremost talent was bringing memorable characters roaring to life, so it’s not surprising that he fell in love with Earl Long. The New Yorker wisely allocated three issues to Liebling’s profile of Long, titled “The Great State”; the articles were later collected in a book with a superior title, “The Earl of Louisiana.”

Like other reporters who joined in the merriment, Liebling came to Louisiana to scoff at Long. “I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula,” he confessed. But, when he watched news coverage of the legislative session, he listened closely to what the ranting governor was saying to the recalcitrant legislators. Long was attacking a law, passed around the time of Reconstruction, that allowed election registrars to disqualify voters on “educational” grounds, a measure designed to push Black people off the voter rolls. “It took me a minute or two to realize that the old ‘demagogue’ was actually making a civil-rights speech,” Liebling wrote. He began to recognize Long as something more important than another Southern political buffoon. Long was a skillful progressive politician operating in a conservative, racist environment. For all the droll humor in Liebling’s coverage, that insight is what made his report a classic.

Liebling’s articles about Long caught my eye when they were published, in the spring of 1960. They influenced my decision to attend Tulane University, in New Orleans, the city that Liebling had painted so vibrantly; they also pointed me toward journalism, and they fixed in my mind The New Yorker as my ideal professional destination. For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth. Most of them, that is. Liebling displayed a New York City chauvinism by mercilessly skewering Chicago, the “second city.” In the evening, when the commuters fled, Chicago was a “vast, anonymous pulp,” he wrote, “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

I have in my office a poster on which Liebling’s portrait is accompanied by his cautionary warning: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” ♦

The Great State—I

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Nell Zink reads her story “The Welfare State,” from the December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026, issue of the magazine. Zink is the author of seven novels, including “Doxology,” “Avalon,” and “Sister Europe,” which was published last year.